hand
is against him who is likely to rise. This wide-spread envy doubles the
chances of common minds who excite neither envy nor suspicion, who
make their way like moles, and, fools though they be, find themselves
gazetted in the "Moniteur," for three or four places, while men of
talent are still struggling at the door to keep each other out.

The underhand enmity of these pretended friends, which Florine would
have scented with the innate faculty of a courtesan to get at truth amid
a thousand misleading circumstances, was by no means Raoul's greatest
danger. His partners, Massol the lawyer, and du Tillet the banker, had
intended from the first to harness his ardor to the chariot of their own
importance and get rid of him as soon as he was out of condition to feed
the paper, or else to deprive him of his power, arbitrarily, whenever
it suited their purpose to take it. To them Nathan represented a certain
amount of talent to use up, a literary force of the motive power of ten
pens to employ. Massol, one of those lawyers who mistake the faculty
of endless speech for eloquence, who possess the art of boring by
diffusiveness, the torment of all meetings and assemblies where
they belittle everything, and who desire to become personages at any
cost,--Massol no longer wanted the place as Keeper of the Seals; he
had seen some five or six different men go through that office in four
years, and the robes disgusted him. In exchange, his mind was now set on
obtaining a chair on the Board of Education and a place in the Council
of State; the whole adorned with the cross of the Legion of honor. Du
Tillet and Nucingen had guaranteed the cross to him, and the office of
Master of Petitions provided he obeyed them blindly.

The better to deceive Raoul, these men allowed him to manage the paper
without control. Du Tillet used it only for his stock-gambling, about
which Nathan understood next to nothing; but he had given, through
Nucingen, an assurance to Rastignac that the paper would be tacitly
obliging to the government on the sole condition of supporting his
candidacy for Monsieur de Nucingen's place as soon as he was nominated
peer of France. Raoul was thus being undermined by the banker and the
lawyer, who saw him with much satisfaction lording it in the newspaper,
profiting by all advantages, and harvesting the fruits of self-love,
while Nathan, enchanted, believed them to be, as on the occasion of his
equestrian wants, the best fe